Think about something as simple as a household appliance.  Got it in your mind?  Good!  Now think about all the materials it is made out of.  That's metal, plastic, glass, heating elements, wiring, etc.  Lots of different stuff, right?  Now think about how many people were involved in making these things.  Think about the mining of raw materials, getting the materials into a usable form, the manufacturing of the actual product, etc. 

This is what modern industrialization has created!  An amazingly effective system that produces everything around you.  I once watched a TED talk on the subject (forgive me, I don't remember which it was), and the speaker talked about how production has changed from expert craftsmen creating everything by themselves to modern production, which is segmented into small, simple tasks spread to millions of people.  He talked about how it would be nearly impossible to recreate something from scratch because every step is so desensitized to the others.

Well, one man has (somewhat) done this nearly impossible task.  Thomas Thwaites decided he wanted to make a toaster from scratch.  And to him, from scratch meant from scratch: from mining and refining the material to the final product.  The article I read from Gizmodo explains his struggles.  Some of the most difficult parts seemed to be refining the iron for his toaster into steel and finding the right designs.  The article is a great and interesting read, so you should go read it.  His final product was a toaster that melted about 5 minutes after it was plugged in.  But still, the 9 months put into this project is amazing, and proves how amazing industrialization has become.

Here is a link to the article: http://gizmodo.com/#!5794368/why-its-harder-than-you-think-to-make-a-simple-toaster

A while ago I found an enteresitng application for the Mac.  It is called BetterTouchTool.  It is an application that can add gestures.  It can add gestures to the trackpad, a magic mouse or a keyboard.  I have been using it with my laptop's trackpad, and it is amazing.  With 55 different gestures, as well as 5 modifier keys, 275 different gestures could be added to do things such as scale text, scale windows, control volume, open applications, etc.  The application is very user friendly, and the possibilities it has for gesture based computing are amazing.

Here is the link to a download: http://blog.boastr.net/

In class, we have discussed web browser rivalry quite a bit.  About whether Firefox or Chrome was better and about how hardly anyone likes IE.  Well, I found an article about web browser popularity, and it organizes it graphically in a really nice way:

http://gizmodo.com/#!5788665/the-popularity-of-web-browsers-visualized

It is interesting to look at the graph and see how the popularity and features have changed with web browsers through the years.  I had almost forgotten about Netscape, literally the browser back in the day.  The graphical organizer makes it easy to analyze the data on the subject and see the rise and fall of browser empires.

An article on Lifehackers brought up an interesting topic: how much does gaming actually cost?  Yeah, consoles range from $180 for the Wii and $300 for the PS3 and the Xbox, but that doesn't count other costs.  Then there is the cost for the games and the chordes and the extra controllers and the additional features etc.  When it is all taken into consideration, the cost of console gaming is way more than it initially looks.  Controllers can be between $20-40 and games can be anywhere from $30-60. 

Take the the collection in my dorm right now.  Currently, side by side, my roomate and I have and Xbox360 next to a Wii next to a PS2. 

Now, the PS2 is no longer worth very much.  If I were to sell it, I might get $100.  Combined, my roommate and I have about 5 games for it, which are probably less than their original price.  Lets estimate conservatively at $100.  Then there are the controllers and memory cards.  Lets say total it is about $250 in price.

Now take the Wii.  It costs about $180.  We have probably over 20 Wii and Gamecube games for it.  So, since some of them are old and maybe not worth much and other are more expensive, lets give them a modest average of $25 a game.  That is $500 of games.  Add in the controllers and nunchuks, that is an ultra conservative $100.  So, for our collection, that would be $780.

And then there is the Xbox.  It costs around $300.  Two controllers and an HDMI cord totaling about $80.  Counting the 4 games and 1 online game, it would be about $150.  So, total, we have $530.

So, total for the console games, my roomate and I have around $1500 in stuff.  In comparison, on my computer, I have 7 games that I have spent a total of around $30 on (thank you Steam for having amazing sales!) plus all the free online games that I want.  It really makes you wonder about whether console gaming is still going to keep itself up being so expensive.

I remember when I first got my iPhone and was super bummed out that it wasn't Flash compatible.  "Everything on the web runs on flash!"  I said to myself. "How am I going to be able to do anything?"
I was wrong.  Since that moment several years ago, I have run into a problem with not having flash on my iPhone maybe twice.  It turns out the big hubbub about Apple's mobile devices not having Adobe Flash wasn't that big of a deal.

Well, I found an article on TechCruch that agreed with me.  It refuted the arguments that the iPhone or iPod touch or iPad were any less without Flash.  The fact of the matter is that not much is soley run on flash anymore.  Yes, YouTube and some other video players are Flash based, but they are accessible by other formats as well.  Also, HTML5 is on a great rise, and will most likely replace Adobe Flash in its functionality on the web in the years to come.  So, when Steve Jobs decided that his products didn't need Flash, he was right, and I see no reason why it wont stay that way.

TechCrunch article: http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/28/apple-flash-suck/

I found an article on Engadget that tied in nicely with the idea about self driving cars that we discussed a little in one of the broadcasts.  The article was about a mind controlled car.  An apparatus is worn on the head that interprets brain wave patterns, and this interpretation is used to control the car.  The ones designing the car, a group of researchers at the Freie Universität Berlin,  are actually a group that have being trying to develop a self driving car like Google is.  The car would drive itself, and the passenger could give commands to the car such as left, right, speed up and slow down to the car.  Here is a video about the research:

I got an iPhone quite a while ago.  Right now I have (wow, just checked) 228 apps.  One of the first apps that I got was Shazam.  It is an amazing app.  Just record 10 seconds of a song, and it can identify it (most of the time).  Then, at some point, they decided to put a limit on the number of songs one could identify on the free version.  Being slightly cheap when it comes to iPhone apps, I found another that did the same thing: SoundHound.  Since then, when I heard a song on the radio or somewhere else that I wanted to know, I would just pick one randomly (unless Shazam was past its limit).

Well, Lifehacker pitted the two apps against each other to see which one was more effective.  They put the two through a series of tests that measured the effectiveness of the apps.  Overall, SoundHound seemed to come out on top.  However, they also found some interesting patterns in the use of the apps.  Shazam seemed to pick up pop music better, while SoundHound had more obscure songs as well.

Original article: http://lifehacker.com/#!5757214/shazam-vs-soundhound-battle-of-the-mobile-song-id-services

I was looking through Gizmodo, and I found three extremely interesting articles, and I couldn't just pick one, so here goes:

The first caught my eye because it simply looked awesome!  Take a look:

I have a secret love for the works of Theo Jansen.  He is a artist/engineer who recreated the wheel.  The somewhat creepy leg looking things beneath the hamster ball are the design of Jansen.  The hamster vehicle was created by this man (I suggest taking a look, his stuff is pretty interesting):
http://crabfuartworks.blogspot.com/2011/02/hamster-powered-walker.html

Also, take a look at Theo Jansen's works sometime, they are amazing.  Here is a video from a while ago about him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcR7U2tuNoY

Original article: http://gizmodo.com/5753306/no-rodents-were-harmed-in-the-making-of-this-elaborate-hamster-wheel


The next article took me by surprise.  It is about a previously un-contacted Amazonian tribe.  It is crazy to think that there are still places in the world that modern society doesn't even know about, much less a place where humans are already living.  Here is an image taken by plane as it passed overhead:

Original article: http://gizmodo.com/5752429/uncontacted-jungle-tribe-caught-on-video


The last article I noticed is about a technology I have recently become interested in.  My mother got a Kindle e-book for Christmas, and the display looked like nothing I would have expected.  No back light, crisp, and looking like they were made to; like paper.  These displays work with e-ink, a somewhat newly widespread technology that uses little battery and looks a lot like regular ink on paper.  Well, the article I found was about an e-ink tablet.  Think about having an endless supply of paper that you could save in a digital format all in the form of something like this:

No more notebooks or backpacks.  If it really had a battery life of 180 hours and only cost $100 dollars like the article said, I would be hard pressed not to buy it.

Original article: http://gizmodo.com/5752688/i-really-really-hope-this-noteslate-paper-tablet-is-real

There has always been a huge fight between media companies and the internet.  The internet makes it so easy to access productions by these companies that many people just find what they want online rather than buying it.  In some ways, music or videos illegally downloaded can be superior to any version one could buy; download a movie from iTunes and you have one severely limited file type that may dissapear if you do the wrong thing.  Torrent a movie and you can have it in any format you want, no restrictions.  This creates a huge problem for the media companies, and they have spent years trying to stop it.

These companies have made a new attempt to inhibit illegal downloading.  They have convinced Google to censor some torrent related searches. Sound like the end of an age, right?  No more freedom on the internet?  Wrong!

The censorship Google has placed might not even be there.  All that has been done is that certain words or phrases (such as bittorrent) will not auto complete.  I tested this out myself, and Google even instructed me to hit enter to see the results.  However, when I put in "illegal download Avatar," it gave me a ton of options to pick from (and even auto completed it for me).  The entire thing seems like just a political struggle.  I imagine a conversation between the media companies and Google.

The MPAA says, "Hey, your helping people steal from us, and if you don't, you are going to make an enemy you don't want!"

So Google says, "Ok," and then precedes to do as little as possible just to say that they tried.

It isn't like this censorship is a first.  Google has censored inappropriate topics from auto completing in the same way to shelter people from accidentally winding up with something on the screen that they didn't want.  The difference is that the only people who will be looking to download a movie or cd will know what they are looking for, and simple censorship like this does nothing.  The only thing it is doing is creating over dramatic reactions; read some of the comments in the original articles.  This situation could cause some concern about future censorship (one thing leads to the next), but I doubt the scene will even be anywhere near what it is now by the time it gets to that point.

Original article:
Google Begins Soft Censorship Of Arbitrary Piracy-Related Queries

I was surfing through Popsci when I came across an article about a new kind of expanding aluminum.  The process starts with manufactured powder that when heated, creates a tough foam that is strong but light.  The aluminum foam was developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz in Germany.  This foam (along with other materials of course) could be used to make lighter hulls for cargo ships.

Whats the big deal with that?  This could significantly reduce the CO2 emission coming from these giant ships.  I searched the internet to see how much the ships put out, and they put out about as much as 50 million cars annually.  With all the buzz about making cars more efficient, it is easy to overlook the fact that most carbon emission comes from the transportation of goods rather than people.  To reduce CO2 emissions, technologies like lighter materials or more efficient engines for large vehicles (rather than private vehicles) are a must.

Article about aluminum foam: New Foaming Metal Could Form Lighter Hulls For Cargo Ships

Information about cargo ship emissions: One Container Ship Pollutes As Much As 50 Million Cars